battle of the image formats (jpg jxl webp avif heic)
I recently did a massive reorganization of all my backups, which included thousands of JPG files I had to move around.
The JPG image format has been around for over 30 years. Yeah, that long. JPG goes all the way back to 1992. As old as it is, it's still the best image format. However, I wanted to see if the newer formats available were any good, so I did some tests, and here's what I came up with.
Since I started using DVD again for long term data storage, I've had ups and downs with this. Things were off to a rocky start at first, and it took me a few tries (along with several discs that ended up being nothing but "coasters" due to bad writes) before I found out what worked.
I figured I might as well document all this here since a lot of this is sprawled across the internet in hard-to-find places. I've mentioned some of what's below before but will also put it here to keep all the info in one spot.
If you took a Fender Stratocaster and tastefully modified it for modern play, what you would end up with is the Pacifica. This is the guitar Yamaha can build that Fender can't because they're not "allowed" to.
I'll explain.
This may be a small thing, but it was mighty convenient.
Flash drives. Tons of them are out there. Easy, cheap data storage, except something is missing that they had before...
...an indicator light.
Skype is set to shut down this year, and this made me think of all the internet specific communications stuff I've used over the decades. Yes, it's decades at this point.
In some respects, I miss how internet communications used to be, but it's not like I'd go back to the old ways.
Oh yes, we're going here. I've been going all-in with learning how to do things with optical media lately, so I went ahead and acquired some CD-R discs.
You might be asking why I would even bother with this. I'll answer that.
In '23, I copied a lot of data off a big pile of old (some ancient) discs I had, both CD and DVD. After getting everything copied over and backed up, I vowed I would never return to optical media storage ever again.
Well, that's changed.
There's a shed where I live. It has electricity (ooh, fancy) and in there is a lone CFL bulb that's been in there for... 7 years or close to it? When turned on cold, it takes a good solid minute for the gas to charge so it achieves full brightness.
But once that gas is charged up...
This new guitar from Fender is not going over well, at least from what guitar players on YouTube are saying.
Yes, if you look up Fender Standard Stratocaster, this is a new model at the time I write this. You will see Fender on the headstock, and a price tag below that of a Fender Player Stratocaster. So what gives? Why so cheap?
In my mind, "SSD" doesn't translate to "old", but yeah, that storage tech has been around for a long time.
One of the oldest SSDs I have is a Crucial CT256M4SSD2 that I bought direct from Crucial themselves back in 2012. I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it probably wasn't cheap. This is what that 256GB SSD looks like these days:
